Cloud-based virtual desktops can cut costs, complexity

Large enterprises can simplify desktop management with virtual desktops. But IT pros often shy
away from this technology, fearing its cost and the complexity. There are ways, however, to
virtualize desktops without the infrastructure requirements, if you trust the cloud.

There are many approaches to virtualizing desktops, and each approach has its tradeoffs.

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Cloud-based
virtual desktops are a viable alternative to building an in-house virtual desktop
infrastructure (VDI), especially for companies that need to provide end users with some corporate
applications and a Web browser but don't want to manage endpoints or back-end infrastructure, said
David Bartoletti, an analyst at The Taneja Group, a Hopkinton, Mass.-based technology analysis
firm.

It is basically like having a sandbox, where our employees can
check personal email and do external collaboration without risking the internal network.

"There are too many ways to deliver that in the virtual desktop market today, so customers have
held off," Bartoletti said. "They are waiting for someone to step in and say, 'It's just a bunch of
Windows desktops, it doesn't have to be that hard.' That's what the hosted desktop providers are
doing."

The pros of hosted VDI
Robin Goldstone, IT project manager at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, said she was
interested in both cloud and virtual desktops, but skeptical of those approaches. The desktop
cloud model let her try out both computing models without too much risk or expense.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is a National Nuclear Security Administration facility
and has extremely tight security, and personal cell phones and Internet access is restricted in
certain areas. Lawrence Livermore 's lockdown policy has been a problem for employees who needed to
access personal email or use social networking tools for work.

"It was a choice between either having unhappy employees, who may leave, or giving them a way to
combine work and life," Goldstone said. "And there is a business use case for social and Web-based
tools, so we wanted to give our employees a way to use them without risking security."

Goldstone said she considered on-premise virtual desktops, but she didn't have in house
expertise or the resources to invest in infrastructure within the timeframe in which she needed
virtual desktops. Hosted
virtual desktops enabled Lawrence Livermore to deploy virtual desktops without the know-how or
cash required to build a VDI on premises.

Like Kaviza, other virtual desktop software companies are offering their products as both
in-house and hosted services. Austin, Texas-based Virtual Bridges recently began offering its KVM-based VDI product as a hosted
package through partners such as Rackspace and IBM, which provides Virtual Bridges desktops for
Panasonic.

Lawrence Livermore chose Kaviza because it integrates with existing platforms, and the remote
desktop experience across the WAN performed well. It is also cost-effective, Goldstone said. The
Kaviza desktops are based on Citrix's latest remote desktop protocol, HDX, and some employees say
the hosted desktops are actually faster than the lab's desktops because they aren't behind a
firewall, Goldstone said.

"It is basically like having a sandbox where our employees can check personal email and do
external collaboration without risking the internal network," Goldstone said.

"We have 14 clinics, and the nightmare is maintaining desktops remotely, doing fixes and
patches," Kline said. "We found ourselves always buying new computers for users and spending more
than we wanted to."

Desktone recently launched Version 3.0 of its hosted desktop offering, which costs $1 per
desktop, per day for the Professional edition, hosted by Rackspace. The cost covers Rackspace's
service-level agreement, but it doesn't include the cost of Windows licensing, which customers have
to own themselves.

Since Kline ditched most of his Microsoft
Office licenses in favor of Google Apps, he doesn't have to pay for Windows licenses, and the
$1 Desktone price tag is even more appealing. He also plans to move to thin clients, which outlive
PCs and have lower power requirements.

"The ROI is very straightforward," he said. "You certainly aren't losing money at the Desktone
price point, but the real value over time is not to have to buy PCs, CPUs and memory."

While Kline trusts Rackspace's infrastructure, security is a major concern in health care, so
the data of patients at Sports and Physical Therapy Associates is not housed in the cloud. Instead,
that information is stored on local servers, he said.

Cloud-based virtual desktop limitations
The virtual desktop as a service model offers clear benefits to some IT pros, but not everyone is
convinced that cloud-based virtual desktops are better than on-premise models.

Jeff Moore, IT infrastructure planning manager at First Interstate Bank in Billings, Mont., is
piloting both VMware
View 4.5 and XenDesktop 4. He said moving to cloud-based VDI is too risky.

His other concern is performance; because cloud-based virtual desktops are delivered from a
remote location over the WAN to end users, it can introduce additional latency. This is
particularly problematic for companies based in parts of the U.S. with poor bandwidth, Moore
said.

"If the VDI environment is hosted at the data center, you do not introduce additional latency,
and latency is the biggest challenge to VDI," he said. "I can say without a doubt you would have to
give each remote location direct Internet access, which introduces additional security
concerns."

The Taneja Group's Bartoletti said cloud-hosted virtual desktops certainly aren't right for
enterprises with special needs, such as high performance and video, it can work well for companies
that need to deliver only basic computing to end users.

"For corporations that just want to deliver desktop apps and Web-based apps to employees, rather
than running a VDI environment just for the traveling and remote employees, it's easier to use
hosted desktops," he said.